He doesn't shrink from that nagging handicap on his incredible talent. "I do next to no action, sequential work anymore because I'm so darn slow," Mark Schultz said on the opening afternoon of WonderCon. "Mostly I've been writing." He is in his element with "Prince Valiant," and his teamwork on the strip with Gary Gianni, and he has just completed a non-fiction graphic novel science primer on genetics and DNA entitled The Stuff of Life. "The mainstream publishers have decided the movement of the future is the graphic novel."

The mainstream comic and illustration fans appreciate that. But they still remember the rush of seeing a new issue of Xenozoic Tales on the newsstand, back in the '80s and on into the 90s ... and their nostalgia for Jack and Hannah and their escort of Cadillacs and dinosaurs has been building for 11 years now. Knowing that every minute Schultz spends at the keyboard is another minute stolen from his drawing board, they sneak up to the artist at cons, wondering if it's finally time for them to surrender their obsession and move on.

Not just yet, as it turns out. Schultz is not only deep into a new graphic novel that will feature 32 new pages of glorious art, but he hopes to be back in 2010 with the long-awaited conclusion to Xenozoic Tales.

The illustrated novella is Storms at Sea. "It's a cautionary story involving global conspiracy and energy supply, wrapped in a film noir framework," Schultz said. "It's given me a chance to draw stuff I've always wanted to draw, like flying saucers crashing into dinosaurs."

Storms at Sea will be published by Flesk Publications, which just published the third volume of Mark Schultz: Various Drawings. Schultz has finished writing the prose portion of the graphic novel but only five of the 32 pages of art.

Schultz says that many of the jobs he takes -- writing Superman: Man of Steel for DC or providing covers for Dark Horse -- are designed to get him the time and financial cushion he needs to return to his art. He knows precisely how long folks have been waiting for that return ticket to the Xenozoic Age: "I feel terribly about it," Schultz said. "It eats away at me. That's why it's been my goal to come back at at least tie up the loose ends of the storyline I was working on."

Drawing with his brand of devotion is a young man's game, and Schultz is 52. "I no longer have the energy to put in the hours, the sheer amount of time and labor that's necessary to do a page," he said. "I'm very slow and very meticulous. I can't focus in on the detail the way I used to. And maybe that's good. Maybe that keeps me from focusing in on the hairy details and allows me to focus instead on the broader picture."

Schultz figures he will need a year to produce the 100 pages of story and art necessary to bring Xenozoic Tales to its fitting conclusion. He is determined to subordinate his passion for the work of Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs to his obsession to finish what he started. "I have a lot of ideas and concepts," he said. "I just can't find the time."

Schultz still retains almost all of the original art to Xenozoic Tales He allowed one story to be auctioned through Heritage, but he refuses to peel off individual pages for sale. "I don't like parting with my work because I don't like seeing my art broken up," he said. The pages were designed to be seen in sequence, he said, not individually framed on a wall.

F.C. Gruger

He continues to collect the black-and-white work of F.R. Gruger, while lamenting that so few people recognize the artist's name: "He's the guy who inspired the style I'm using in Storms at Sea. Norman Rockwell called him the best draftsman of that age." Schultz stumbled upon Gruger's work in a volume of American Illustrator 10 years ago in San Diego and eventually hit the jackpot at Illustration House in New York. "I called asking if they had any of his work," Schultz said, "and they said c'mon up and prepare to spend the entire day."